12 Infrasonic Hours in 3 Minutes!
At face value this probably sounds like a hard drive skipping, but what you're hearing is actually quite the mystery. Let me explain:
We've all heard me go on and on about the hidden world of ultrasonic sounds, but INFRAsonic sounds, AKA the sounds and vibrations below the human hearing range, are equally as interesting, but many times more difficult to capture.
If you recall from The Hum video, I used a metal box with long tubes that spread out over a 20x20ft area to create a giant geophone of sorts that allowed me to record infrasonic and seismic data. I wasn't too reliant on it as "the hum" is heard by humans, so it's hunting for the wrong frequencies to begin with. But it did get the juices flowing for the sounds underneath.
One does not just buy an ultrasonic microphone and plug it into a recorder. The sound capturing process works much more like a vibration analysis task. Which compressions and rarefactions are we hunting for? Up and down? Forward and backward? All 3 dimensions?
Fortunately geologists have been doing this for a long time and seismography has come a long way from the roll of paper and the mechanical pen. Most data is captured in their own formats made for this type of measurement, like SAC or MiniSEED, which is a goldmine in itself as seismology requires everyone to share their data to rule out localized noise when trying to figure out what's going on geologically.
Unlike the ultrasonic world, there's tons of noise in the infrasonic realm due to how far and spread out low vibrations travel. An enormous amount of noise pollution is also created by infrastructure, but this is actually kind of cool as nearly every single thing you pick up is an absolute mystery.
For example, in the image below shows about 24 hours of recording from a seismograph outside in the corner of a tool shed on my farm. Every 15 minutes or so, there's a bunch of activity that is nearly identical. Maybe it's the water heater clicking on? Or the air conditioner pump in my studio routinely pulling in new water?
Around 3am, we apparently had a 30 minute long enormous rumble. I was on the porch responding to emails at the time and certainly didn't notice it. I don't even have a theory!
Monitoring this data isn't very challenging, but listening to it is more complicated than one would think. You can't just dump a seismograph file into Audacity. Not only are the waveform ranges completely different than a digital audio file, but a LOT of math is required to simulate the waves to read as pascals, or sonic pressure waves. Once this is done, a bit more math is required to build a time series, and finally, after about 2 years of occasionally going on frustrating binges to get an "infrasound microphone" working, I have a workflow!
What you're hearing is part of that tool shed recording. You'll hear occasional plonks and rumbles as if I'm adjusting a microphone. Amusingly each one of these sounds typically lasted for 5+ minutes in real time and were, of course, too low for the human ear to pick up.
Those high pitched tones are steady rumbles, probably from nearby HVAC units. The routine clicking is that unknown water heater or coolant sound I speculated earlier. Then, tons of rumbling from...nobody knows.
This isn't some crazy phenomenon or spooky mystery. This is just the world of infrasound. Nobody seems to every know wtf they're hearing and are typically trained to recognize patterns of natural seismic events.
Speaking of that, I'm excited to bring some of my kit to Yellowstone next month to, perhaps, if I'm lucky enough, be able to let my viewers be among the first humans to listen to enormous geothermal events and geysers!
Comments (26)
My first suspect for source of the hum would be a hydro electric dam pumping water back into a reservoir overnight. There are two near ATL but not sure if either does this. (Probably not!)
The burst of noise at 2 mins to 2:30 seems to have a regular mechanical "hum" in the background, could it be a farm related noise like a field being ploughed?
this is dope !
It would be great if you could upload your Yt videos here too! Just discovered your channel, seriously impressed. Yt makes it very hard to use its platform without watching ads and being tracked, Patreon works fine over Grayjay also when using a VPN.
I'm at the point where I have to use ad blockers for YT specifically. They trigger me... enough to think I should see someone about it lol.
So is it a sped up playback, then?
Really really interesting! Something to explore further myself, methinks..
This is incredible, it scratches that itch that all mysteries do! I'll be wondering if it's a well pump or a distant sewage lift station or something all day now
Amazing, I'm gonna use this in my Digitakt 😊
Really fascinating, thx for the share. I think there's a lot to still be discovered that's outside the realm of how we think about receiving/monitoring/analyzing what's observable. I truly think some of the answers to the hardest questions are right in front of us, we just don't know how, or have forgotten how to see them. As humans, we get better at learning and processing partly by figuring out how to quickly recognize patterns rather than looking at individual details. Said differently, we're looking for the quickest shortcut to seeing only the signal and eliminating the noise, but it's not objective, since we usually set out on a task looking for a specific signal. What things have we been actively ignoring since our earliest days as both individuals and as a species that our developed reasoning and curiosity skills might interpret differently today?
Took me back to the summer of 1968, watching James Bond belly his way through the enormous plumbing pipes of Dr. No's Caribbean base, with reverberating sonic pulses washing over him. Strange, but literally earthly.
fascinating
This, along with the concept of animals operating at different time scales, makes me wonder what something like a tree "hears". I imagine they operate at an infrasonic time scale.
Super interesting. Are the sounds processed in any way? Sounds like there‘s a reverb on them
Yeah it does! Reverb is just reflections... So I imagine given the varied densities of rock, soil, and metal you would naturally get some amount of natural reverb. I wonder if recording near some sort of large metal industrial area would result in a "plate" reverb sound... Lol
Set up 3 of them in a triangle and triangulate the sources. If you really wanted to go crazy, find a deep well or something and set up 4 in the shape of a tetrahedron to see if the sound is coming from underground.
Slowed down to .471ish and it sounds like Ligeti
Beautiful ambience. Strangely, I was waiting for whale song to appear.
Finally some REAL underground ambiant music!!
So, if this is 12 hours of sample in 3 min, does that mean it's "pitch shifted" by about 8 octaves? Or, is that too simplistic a way of thinking about it? Either way, it's fascinating!
Yes, 8 octaves seems about right. 720 minutes (12 * 60) / 3 minutes is 240, which is nearly 8 halvings of time (and thus doubling of frequencies). Blending pitched up ground movements and pitched down bird song (from the previous video) together is an interesting idea, for about a 24 octave range folded into the range of human hearing 🤔 Ewen
Once you've got them in the audio domain, assuming that it might be trivial to filter out some of the constant sources? Might also be neat to correlate with train schedules, over flying aircraft, things of that nature. Municipal water stations might be a culprit as well cuz they got to pump that stuff up to the top of the water towers and I'm sure that's a source
I second the gift to humanity sentiment, wholeheartedly. Aside from just enjoying your library of compositions this just blows me away and is ineffably frigging cool
You, my friend, are a gift to humanity
Cannot wait for the results of this! I was imagining all sorts of strange drills digging deep into the earth with how that sounded towards the end. Eerie stuff
Man, this makes me feel bad for the mole people that have to live with all the industrial noise we produce! But in all seriousness, I wonder if there's any crossover with underwater noise pollution